


one day we'll look at the past (with love)

by feather_cadence



Category: Lego Ninjago
Genre: Gen, this is just a nice conversation over dinner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 21:38:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19326610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feather_cadence/pseuds/feather_cadence
Summary: Sometime in the far future, Ninjago is at peace. Its saviors have dinner and talk about the past.





	one day we'll look at the past (with love)

**Author's Note:**

> i just watched ep 100 and im Emotional so heres some thoughts about a nice future. related to another fic thats proabably coming soon

Lloyd Garmadon takes a deep breath, leans back in his chair, and watches the sunset.

It’s a beautiful thing - gold clouds in delicate spirals, magnificent washes of color fading towards the horizon, long shadows and cicada song. The blue above fades slowly to purple as the sun sinks beneath the horizon. He watches the first stars come out.

It is a spectacle he will never be tired of.

A warm breeze skims across the mountaintop, and he hears the monastery door open behind him. He turns to see Nya walking towards him, and he offers her a smile. She stands beside him and looks out at the last of the red and orange at the horizon.

“You’ve got the right idea,” she says, smiling. “This always reminds me it was worth it.”

Lloyd nods. “Me too.”

She keeps her eyes on the sky for a second longer, then affectionately hits Lloyd on the arm. “Dinner’s ready,” she says. She offers a hand to help him stand and he takes it, hearing the tell-tale grinding noises from his bad knee as he follows her back through the gates.

“Who’s cooking tonight?” he asks as they walk across the training yard. On the far side, the wooden training weapons are neatly arranged on their racks, and a training dummy is halfway through being repaired. Its arm is lying in the dust next to it.

“Zane and Cole,” she says. “So odds are it’ll be good.”

He nods. “It only took Cole thirty years to learn how to cook,” he says as they step inside, “but I’m glad he finally did.”

Nya laughs, the sound sinking into the warm, familiar hallways. “Your plan of always putting him on the same cooking schedule as Zane finally paid off,” she says. Lloyd laughs with her. 

The pair turns and walks down a hallway lined with closed doors, though dust motes floating serenely through the warm gold light. These walls have been destroyed and rebuilt more times than Lloyd can count, each time a little stronger, a little more determined to stand. This building was never the same from year to year but was full of memories all the same - there, the room that had once been the weapon store and now was filled with Zane’s houseplants, here the rooms that had once held their students, who were now off saving people in Ninjago City, around the corner the old library, no longer used for mission research but for a quiet space that Cole used for afternoon naps. And all of it diffused in the same gold light, soft and warm.

They can hear the kitchen before they get there as Kai’s raucous laughter echoes down the hall, followed by the distinctive noise of something being thrown. They hear Kai laugh again, and Nya just rolls her eyes.

Despite it technically being Zane and Cole’s job to cook tonight, all five of them are in the kitchen - Zane washing dishes, Cole stirring something on the stove, Kai neatly dicing vegetables, Pixal passing Jay plates out of the cabinet to set the table. Nya breezes over to grab silverware and help and Lloyd is behind her to set out napkins.

It is an easy, well-practiced routine. These seven have lived nearly their whole lives with each other, and they have all memorized the exact movements of the others. Nya knows Cole will refuse to use a soup spoon despite the fact that they’re eating soup, and sets a regular one at his place. Kai ducks under Cole’s arm to get past him to the table and Cole barely has to stop stirring. When Kai stops to throw a carrot at his sister, catches it without looking and throws it right back in his direction, to hit him in the eye.

Cole walks past to put the soup on the table and Kai makes a show of having been hit, clutching at his eye. “I can’t believe you would do that, Nya. I think - I think you broke my eye. I’m gonna have to get an eyepatch like Jay now.”

“Very funny,” says Jay, deadpan, purposefully looking over his shoulder with his bad eye.

“Kai, you’re fine,” says Cole. “It was a carrot. Those are good for your eyes.”

Lloyd laughs as he sits. The soup is passed around, everyone talks about nothing, which is exactly what is important now. The news this morning, which had some actor no one recognized on it. The weather. The grocery store Zane went to in the town over, which he is ecstatic to report did not recognize him at all. The repairs which need to be done on the roof before it storms again. Casually, Nya mentions she is thinking of cleaning out the caves which used to house their dragons and have sat empty for ages.

“Holy shit,” Cole says. “I totally forgot we had those.”

“I parked a jet in there once, like, three years ago,” Jay adds. “Not sure where it went.”

“What would we use them for?” Pixal asks.

“I dunno,” Nya says. “Whatever we want. We could keep them open for wild dragons to nest in.”

“I like that idea,” Lloyd says. In some great fight in the past thirty years, a bunch of dragons from the Realm of Oni and Dragon had entered Ninjago and taken up permanent residence there. The number of dragons in the wild was steadily growing, which was a neat effect of what had probably had been a tragedy at the time.

“Shit, they’re gonna be such a fucking mess,” Kai says, with a half laugh. “Do you remember the kind of people we were when we had those dragons?”

“Yeah, of course,” says Cole. “We were kids who thought we had better things to do than clean shit up.”

“I object to that,” Zane says. “I managed to keep things plenty clean.”

“You were the one fucking savior we had, Zane,” Nya says. “When you were dead it was a literal hellscape.”

The nice thing the past is that the further you are from it, the less it can hurt you. Yes, all of them still have nightmares and irrational fears and a need to be able to see all the exits to a room at all times, yes Lloyd still gets antsy in windy weather, but it is all force of habit. The knowledge that the path cannot hurt you anymore is a powerful thing, and the events that were once tragedies are tossed around easily, their sharp edges forgotten and worn.

“My apologies,” Zane says with a chuckle. “Although I admit I really hoped that you all would have learned something from that.”

“We did!” Jay says. “We learned that people that want to bring a bunch of ancient snake people back are generally not be trusted to plan tournament events that are fair.”

Everyone at the table laughs.

“Can someone pass the soup, or am I gonna have to use my powers to levitate it into my bowl?” asks Nya. Kai rolls his eyes and passes the soup. Lloyd leans forwards on the table and just soaks up the environment around him - the talking and laughter and the comfort of movement in a space where each motion is familiar and practiced. He takes in the gold light, and the dust motes, and the smell of cooking onions hanging in the air, and the cicadas outside the window. He laughs along, and comments when Kai says something stupid, and nods as Zane explains something complex that he was reading about earlier. He no longer has to worry about planning for some mission in the future, or worry that something he did in the past would set off some long line of disasters. He could just be in the moment, and listen to the cicadas.

Once, a very long time ago, someone important had given Lloyd an important choice in a dream. He could not remember their face, or their name, or what the choice was - just the vague impression of light and flower petals and the feeling of being at peace. At the time, in that dream, he had been scared that he would never feel that at peace again because he was young and the world was a dangerous place that was his job to protect.

The world is no longer a dangerous place. Lloyd laughs at dinner and falls asleep later on the couch surrounded by people the people he loves and he feels the same peace. He feels it when he wakes up too, and walks through his monastery, and helps his family clean out old dragon stalls, and messages his old students to make sure they’re all right.

He can’t remember what the choice was, in that old dream.

But Lloyd Garmadon knows that he made the right one.


End file.
